I am really confused with this.
I have a Home Lab on a HP Gen8 MicroServer running ESXi 6.5u1.
1 Datastore 400GB with some Server/Client VMs
The Datastore is part of a 2TB SATA Disk. I have 1.43TB available which is visible under Storage > Devices
I use the same IP Range across all devices 192.168.0.x
I want to use the 1.4TB disk as a shared drive which I can access across my Client and Server VMs and also from my laptop that I RDP into those VMs on my ESXi host.
The main idea is to copy and store files I download and need to install etc. This is so I do not have to upload each file individually to the datastore via the datastore browser web interface.
I currently do this with a very old NAS disk on the network but this is slow and not working well as the disk goes into power save mode and it's a pain to wake it back up.
It is also not letting me create that free space into a new Datastore.
I can only expand the existing 400GB VMFS datastore into the full free space of the disk 1.43TB.